LSD is also known for it's use in treating migraines (about a 1/4 of a recreational dose is effective). I used to keep a supply for this purpose as I was unable to afford the prescription drugs that provide me relief. Unfortunately, LSD carries such a heavy penalty that I no longer do this and usually just shut myself in a dark room for a day or two when I get migraines. I'm lucky that I get them very rarely as opposed to those that get them monthly or even weekly.
I remember a short blurb in a Cary Grant [auto?]biography about his use of the drug in therapy and how it changed his life and perspective for the better.
It bothers me that a drug like this is so demonized that its possible therapeutic values are almost completely ignored. I know that there are some researchers still doing work in the area, but they are very few due to the huge legal obstacles at the federal levels.
I see this as just one more area where prohibition has harmed us. It's so sad that science has become subject to government after so many hundreds of years working to free it from the yoke of religion.
Edit: BTW, LSD is listed as a Schedule I drug (the most serious according to US law) and is listed with other such threats as MDMA, heroin, and mankind's worst enemy: Marijuana. It also carries a life sentence in federal prison upon a second trafficking offense.
It is demonized as it wakes the user up to the bullshit of the system. If you see the universe in all its natural glory, you flatly reject the idea that you should pay fealty to the faulty systems of corrupt humans.
LSD is illegal because it creates more Humanity in humans, Humanity which is more closely connected with reality.
When the military tested cannabis and LSD on soldiers, it made them lose discipline indefinitely. They probably thought of it more as "turning them into hippies" than "waking them up to the bullshit", but either way they didn't like it.
Prohibition makes a lot of sense from the point of view of an army that might need to draft a lot of men and make good soldiers out of them quickly.
Funny, a Liberal Arts education can have a similar effect on people. Bell Telephone ran a program where managers were given a humanities education, and by the end of it most of them wanted to work less and spend more time with their families:
Is a hippie a kind of Animal? How can you go full hippie? They're f'ing soldiers! They were becoming apathetic and moralised when they had brief moments of realisation that they were all brainwashed by their drill sergeants.
Whilst I generally agree with you that these drugs alone don't magically "wake people up", wouldn't you agree that one of the primary functions of government is to ensure social stability?
It would therefore be strange for governments not to try to control substances that had the potential to upset this. No conspiracy is required, just pragmatism.
When the Controlled Substances Act was passed, it included many, many drugs that had been previously criminalized under several different and conflicting laws. That act was an attempt unify drug policy. Nothing can be inferred from that act about why any given drug was or was not criminalized. However the timing of the act is a bit curious, given it happened shortly after a rise in drug use in a class of people who were anti-authoritarian and talked a lot about the cultural effects of drugs.
For your links, here are 2: the first espouses the premise -
These past two statements illustrate pretty clearly why very little research has been done on this subject. One mention of LSD, or many drugs for that matter, and you have people jumping to two extremes (that have nothing to do with the original topic of off-label treatment / pain-management.
I have no experience, so I can't say who's right or wrong. I just think it's sad that these type of arguments have given some drugs so much of a stigma that it set back medical research in this area for 40+ years.
Please, tell me what extreme statement I made. I am in favor of drug research (and in many cases, responsible drug use) and have even posted a scholarly paper below referencing how the effects can be positive.
What I am not in support of is the fallacious "X illegal drug has effect Y, therefore it is illegal because the government doesn't want you to experience Y" argument.
I think the short of it is that if you need LSD to make you see that there's something wrong with the system, you're probably not out of grade school. LSD was used to treat criminals and reduced recidivism -- what does that say? It certainly isn't going to turn us all into Weather Underground types.
I have a bit of tripping experience. I'll try to explain something.
The things you see and think and feel on acid are often highly personal, possibly embarrassing (vouch), and difficult to express. There is an aphorism, which, like so many aphorisms, is uselessly true: "enjoy the little things". It's hard to take this advice if you've forgotten what the "little things" are, never mind appreciating them; if you try to take this advice, you might just emulate some clichés you saw in a movie or a show and bore yourself.
This is what it's like to roll a joint on mushrooms:
One of my friends, who has tripped many times, when I was describing a novel psychedelic to him, asked:
"Does it do that thing, where you're like ..."
snaps fingers slowly several times
And... yeah. That thing. You forget yourself, you notice yourself. It is totally exquisite.
Psychedelic introspection draws on this. It is an utterly human phenomenon that one thinks of their beliefs and ideas as part of them, when they are nothing of the sort (cf. Five Aggregates). It becomes much easier to realize you have a drinking problem when you have first realize that you lose nothing by realizing that you have a drinking problem.
Perhaps you have done something wrong: it does you no harm to accept this. Perhaps you have aligned yourself with bad company: seeing them for who they are makes them no worse than they were before. Perhaps you have been wasting time: you waste no more time if you start working.
Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.
Ryokan returned and caught him. "You may have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift."
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.
Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow, " he mused, "I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."
It is a common lament of the e-lucy-diated: so many of the world's problems would be resolved if those people could see this beautiful moon. But who should take acid? What would it do? And how could the world possibly benefit?
Consider the case of the police interrogator who tortures a false confession out of an innocent sixteen-year-old and destroys a life. How does one survive an encounter with a mirror after such an abhorrent act? A person will recoil in abject horror at even the possibility of admitting to have done such a thing. The belief that you have done it becomes a demon, and it is as though it attacks your mind, and so your mind runs and hides.
In a state of constant renewal -- which is the only true state of the mind -- a memory can be seen for what it is, and one can react honestly, appropriately, and ethically, with true humility. But when people are denying reality, they are helpless to change it. And perhaps the moon can remind a person that theft is not a very good life-track to follow.
I do not mean to present LSD as the solution to the world's problems. I mean to present LSD as LSD. From my perspective, I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface, and already I am caught up in dramatic overexpression and gratuitous use of italics. I had hoped to write a good post. That did not happen.
Last year I've realized (mostly from reading some pretty cool books) that I still had a lot of implicit assumptions about how the world goes. To my surprise, I find myself leaning towards a soft form of conspiracy theory (or class war, if you will), of "us vs them".
To me this came from having access to a historical perspective. But the resulting shift was so subjective, so much like seeing the same things from a different perspective that I can no longer say with conviction that drugs like LSD could never do the same thing. The fact that a dose of a drug gives you no new information may not be so important, as long as it helps you rearrange the knowledge you already have.
The effects of LSD (and whether or not I personally have done LSD) are completely irrelevant to your claim that it is Schedule I because it will "awaken the masses." I don't doubt that it can lead to meaningful introspection-- there are very reputable studies that show that psilocybin (the hallucinogen found in "magic mushrooms") does this for even non-drug users.[1]
The original claim which I was responding to is so baseless that I do not feel that the burden of proof is on my side.
The original claim may be floridly expressed, but I don't think you can write it off as baseless.
Wouldn't you agree that one of the primary functions of government is to ensure social stability?
It would therefore be strange for governments not to try to control substances that had the potential to upset this. No conspiracy is required, just pragmatism.
Given that LSD advocates in the 60's and 70's loudly proclaimed its power to transform society, whether accurate or not, it would have been irresponsible for governments to ignore this.
Although I think that LSD and other psychedelics have great potential for aiding therapy and introspection, I think there's a lot of evidence against the idea that it automatically 'wakes people up to the system'. It takes more than just the drug to do that.
I grew up in the UK, and witnessed the rave and drug scene from 1988 onwards. Millions of doses of LSD were consumed, and continue to be consumed. I don't see millions of people awakened to the system.
I'd bet that the net consequence of every single person in society dosing acid once, like the Merry Pranksters dreamed of, would have been more along the lines of a slight decrease in net societal productivity than a total counter-cultural revolution.
LSD just tweaks one of the signaling systems in your brain. The resulting experience is highly subjective. I don't think it should be schedule 1 but it can harm some people as much as it helps others.
I have a theory about mental disorders caused by drugs. It is due to what Jung described as an inability to adapt. Our energies are ideally focused on improving our ability to deal with reality, i.e., adapt. When the mind finds itself in a situation to which it can't adapt, it turns its energies inward to create internal adaptations. These are the skills via which we mature such as confidence, acceptance, or patience. Mental neuroses, in Jung's opinion, were symptoms of this internal focus of the psychic energies.
Drugs like LSD can change our mind's perceptions far quicker than we are evolved to handle. If a person's mental skills are not up to par, it leads to a regression of some magnitude which can lead to disturbing side effects ranging from minor neuroses to schizophrenia. Look at those that have mental disturbances lasting only a few weeks or months before they are resolved. This could be explained by the resolution of internal issues and focus being returned to the external world.
This is probably a bunch of hogwash, but I've never heard a more satisfactory explanation so I stick with it.
Perhaps. I have two good friends that developed permanent mental illness catalyzed by drug use. One is in an institution and the other takes a fistful of anti-psychotics everyday to get by. I do think that some people benefit from psychedelics but the dangers are very real for others.
A good friend had some traumatic experiences due to hallucinogen-induced psychosis. Experiences from LSD, mescaline, and the like prior to the episode were embraced with open arms and handled well. There seemed to be some switch that flipped, not due to any sort of internal fortitude but instead some purely biochemical reaction. He's been on antipsychotics since.
That said, he holds the substances in high regard for their ability to open the mind. Users should simply be aware that predisposition to psychosis can't be identified before the episode, something like 4 in 1000 will have such a reaction (http://www.maps.org/research/abrahart.html - see Cohen and Malleson research discussion)
LSD trips are usually intensely emotional experiences. Any intensely emotional experience can trigger psychotic symptoms in people predisposed to them.
If you advise people predisposed to psychosis to stay away from LSD, you should also advise them to stay away from sex and any and all other intensely emotional experiences.
That said, there's always a risk to doing anything. People choose to engage in risky behaviors every day. You take a risk by moving your butt out of your chair. You certainly take a pretty big risk to your mental and physical well-being by riding in or driving a car (it risks your mental well-being due to the possibility of brain injury in an accident). Yet people do it all the time. Often without giving it a second thought -- and if you point out the risk they're taking, they'll usually shrug it off.
Some people like to risk their lives by smoking tobacco, others by drinking alcohol, yet others by stuffing their face with junk food. For some the fun is in risking their lives skydiving, or scubadiving, or hang-gliding, or paragliding, or surfing, or spelunking, or swimming.
But you don't have to go to extremes to risk your life. Just hanging out at the local pub is risky (you could get injured or killed in a brawl). Climbing a ladder is risky. Crossing a street is risky.
But once the subject turns to drugs people start freaking out about the fact that you're taking a risk by doing them, as if taking risks was something only crazy homeless people and stunt-car drivers did, and not something they themselves did every day of their lives.
The intensity of an LSD experience is in a completely different category than almost any other conventional experience. I was as dismissive of the risks as you were until I saw two good friends develop permanent mental illness as a result of psychedelic experiences.
> So how come that the trips lasts 5-12 hs, with negligible blood concentrations?
Some drugs are very tightly bound to the receptors they target. (A few are even permanent, so the target protein has to be recycled to turn off the drug.) The blood-brain barrier serves as a one way gate that retains some drugs despite falling blood levels.
I could talk for hours about how my internal explorations (sometimes with drugs, often without) have dramatically accelerated my growth. I am very passionate about my change, but I don't really want to start a philosophical debate about the ethics of drug use.
I see this article more focused on the idiocy of and harm done by the Controlled Substance Act of 1970. I am convinced that was a major turning point in the descent of the USA into where we are today politically and socially. It could be argued that the law was a symptom of our society, but there is no doubt that the loss of our rights was greatly accelerated in 1970.
It's not just the USA either. Look at how it has affected policies, wars, violence, scandals, and corruption throughout the world. Look at the violence in Mexico right now: 100% attributable to the War on Drugs. Prohibition failed us in the 1920's and it is failing the world right now.
I could talk for hours about how my internal explorations (sometimes with drugs, often without) have dramatically accelerated my growth. I am very passionate about my change, but I don't really want to start a philosophical debate about the ethics of drug use.
I for one am very interested in hearing your story. Mind emailing me?
Honest question because the "growth" and "waking up" aspect very often comes up: how do you know you have "grown" and not just got lost in meaningless meandering and your drug-induced perception made you think you reached a "higher level"?
I don't attribute my personal growth to drugs. I attribute it to years of self-examination and introspection. It is hard work and the difficult acceptance of my flaws. Drugs did however provide the occasional signposts to help me along the way.
Most people are blind to their own failings. A new perspective due to a sudden insight can change your life; I think some drugs allow for an increase in the frequency of those insights.
I don't think I have reached a higher level necessarily, but I used to be insecure, depressed, negative, timid, lazy, and immature just to start. Now I am confident, assertive, positive, and strong-willed. I am a totally different person. I'm definitely not perfect, but I'm not done. I have many flaws, and I'll find many more. This is a lifelong process.
That sounds like quite an amazing change, wow and congratulations! I always wanted to try certain substances but I am worried about side effects and no idea where to find a safe setting, let alone legal implications. I wouldn't even know where to begin.
What were the/were there any psychedelic effects of the dosage you took? Did you find you could still "function" in day to day life (work, school, etc)?
There weren't any psychedelic effects at that dose for me, but there might be for others. You could try a lower dose, but that became a really tiny piece of paper. I did feel a little slower, and it was slightly more difficult to focus during school. It also had an anti-depressant effect. I am very fortunate that I only get migraines a couple of times a year so the fogginess was never a real issue.
> Unfortunately, LSD carries such a heavy penalty that I no longer do this and usually just shut myself in a dark room for a day or two when I get migraines.
There is a cheap (prescription) drug called ergotamine that tickles brain receptors similar to those affected by LSD.
There are also the triptan class of drugs such as Relpax. The problem is you have to go to a doctor to get a prescription. Doctor visits are expensive (relative to my income for most of my life) unless you have access to a school clinic or you have insurance. Migraine medicines should be OTC. The side effects don't warrant limited access.
This is my understanding of the schedule I drugs: they're listed as schedule I because they're not medically usable, and they're not medically usable because they're listed as schedule I.
You got it! Except it's a bit confounded because a few of the schedule 1 drugs really, truly aren't medically usable because they are trumped by substances proven to be less harmful.
So yet another "illegal" drug that could have been improving/saving countless lives for years needlessly prevented from being used by idiot US prohibitionists.
The destructive consequences of alcohol or morphine addiction are in no small regard caused by the fact that it's possible to indulge in the drug daily, and therefore it is easy to completely lose yourself in the cycle of drug use.
This problem does not occur with LSD, since LSD tolerance builds up incredibly fast. It is simply not practical to use it more often than once a week, and even this frequency is unusual with most users, since longer periods of abstinence between trips have a very direct and positive influence on the quality of the experience. Most regular users are very well aware of this, and their usage patterns reflect this fact.
There is no pattern to be found in what you described, since LSD is a dramatically different kind of drug compared to the other two you mentioned.
You keep making this point, but it's a straw man. The issue is whether we ought to study these drugs for therapeutic usages, and what such studies find.
I'm also personally familiar with several (> 10) people who used MDMA to treat depression (other than PTSD), both independent of conventional psychotherapy and in a few cases in conjunction with it (by telling the doctor after independently dosing; since he's an MD he has a duty to care for the patient even if he's "on an illegal drug" at the time, but isn't at personal legal risk).
I would consider the long-term risks of 1-5 doses of MDMA over a year FAR lower than the side effects of prescribed antidepressants or other psychiatric medications on an ongoing or permanent basis. (I'm not a doctor, though. Just going based on observation of a not statistically significant number in both groups.)
Interesting. What are your thoughts on how to make sure what you're getting is actually MDMA and not rat poison or something? Or is this concern just baseless media hysteria?
According to the Wikipedia article on LSD, the US DEA claims that the drug among other things "produces...no lasting positive effect in treating alcoholics."
The TSA chimed in, noting that LSD also produces no safeguard against "things that go BOOM!"
Not at all actually. LSD seems to quite a safe drug, and I'm beginning to question why it is illegal. Alcohol on the other hand seems to be much more dangerous.
Temporary insanity is viewed as dangerous. LSD is a particularly harsh substance, so on the scale of psychedelics... I would legalize it right before PCP.
I could classify many a drunk person as exhibiting temporary insanity, and clearly drunk people are dangerous. Should I assume you support prohibition of alcohol as well?
Evidence based dear sir... evidence based. We don't really want to start legalizing drugs based on subjective perception, we want to start having studies and publishing numbers, and make decisions based on them.
With drug-induced chronic psychosis a possibility (as with pretty much ALL more potent drugs), I am not sure "quite safe" is exactly the right word, despite the odds...
Neither temporary insanity nor psychosis nor a horror trip are potential adverse side-effects of your first few pints... when kept under control and those adverse effects aside, recreational use of acid would probably not do more harm than controlled recreational alcohol consumption - but acid is far more potent and each use poses these threats.
When humans and most mammals give birth the female body produces a drug that produces psychedelic effects as a counter to pain of child birth on the baby.
And guess what? That replay of effects is what we call the illusion of near death experiences that some experience later in life..
Tidbit #2, towards the end of a pregnancy, there is a MASSIVE rush of DMT in the mothers body. They don't really know why, but its suggested that its the "life" or consciousness flowing into the baby.
But yes, the biological machine is beyond fascinating! Mind boggling!
There's some evidence that ketamine, at least is released in near death experiences. Having taken ketamine twice, this is not something that I wish to happen to me. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in chidbirth also, but I don't know of any evidence pointing towards that.
I wonder how many of those alcoholics moved on to psychedelics after treatment :)
You guys are downvoting me, but at the time addiction and alcoholism were considered separate phenomenon. Psychedelics being new, nobody predicted the 1970s and burnt out hippies, thus the study doesn't seem to take into account alcoholics becoming drug addicts.
Good point if you've grown up around addicts you'll know that it's VERY common for them to simply substitute one drug for another.
In the lucky cases they substitute meth with alcohol, tobacco and coffee but I could totally picture someone going for cannabis, LSD instead of alcohol.
Essentially, it's a psychological thing and it's rarely about the substance itself. LSD is just a replacement for the god experience.
However I'd take this opportunity to recommend the documentary Ibogaine - A rite of passage.
Not a good point AT ALL. LSD tolerance builds up over absurdly short times. If you take a dose today, and another tomorrow, you'll experience drastically fewer effects. Thus, you never hear of "LSD addicts". There may be other psychological dangers involved for certain individuals, but addiction is not going to be a concern, for purely physiological reasons.
Seriously? People take too much acid, get real into drug culture and end up living in a bus down by the river. Over time psychedelics can erode the mind.
Perhaps they're suffering from HPPD, which can happen to some people. LSD is not 100% safe. Regardless, I think it is more likely they moved on to other drugs as hallucinogens aren't the kind of thing you'd want to take every day or get addicted to.
Dopamine agonists (heroin, cocaine, Farmville, et al.) are the kinds of drugs that people get addicted to. They are not the kinds of things you would want to get addicted to. Heroin and cocaine have other actions beyond dopamine, but Farmville and friends are a rather beautiful example of pure dopamine engines. The attached money pump increases the evil factor.
I don't think it's a good point at all, unless it comes with some evidence. There is so much FUD, wishful thinking, and social harm surrounding this topic that we need to be particularly careful with it.
I haven't read the study, but given the attitudes towards alcoholism and addiction at the time, the tests wouldn't have followed up to see if the alcoholics were binging on psychedelics... which plenty of people did in that era.
I see your point with many substances, but to characterize psychedelics as such is to completely misunderstand their effect and misunderstand the reason they may be of benefit in cases of addiction. But, such misunderstanding is understandable. Honestly, the best I can do is to describe the experience is to relate it to a shift in perspective ... like looking at a wire-frame drawing of a cube and mentally flipping which side is nearer. You never can see both frames of reference at the same time.
Even when I experimented with lsd (many years ago), precisely because of this shift I'd never really be able to remember or comprehend what I was getting into--let alone describe it--until I was in it. And when your in it, its seeing without the safety barriers your subconscious has erected. I've heard Buddhists monks relate: its like catching a glimpse of Nirvana without the spiritual work necessary to prepare you for it. Yes, seeing the awesome potential and absolute miracle of consciousness and life can be a truly ecstatic experience. But, being brought face-to-face with your failings and inadequacies before you're ready to see can be equally harrowing.
Towards the end, I was left to realize that although I kept showing up to class the lessons were over. The experience was no longer pleasurable, just disorienting. For most, it eventually becomes obvious that what you're experiencing is only a tired picture and that there is real work still to be done.
Hey - put it into Google scholar search. Essentially, around 100 addicts take the substance while trying to get off of heroin, most of them never get a withdrawal symptom from Heroin, and are off it. Some go straight back to Heroin and a guy dies, I think.
They draw plenty of conclusions, you'll see if you do that Google search.
One of the guys who used to run NYC's hacker ISP is now involved in Ibogaine research at a university somewhere -- it seems like a pretty legitimate medical treatment for addiction.
maps.org is the source I trust the most for information on current drug research. They funded the PTSD MDMA study as well as other work.
I remember a short blurb in a Cary Grant [auto?]biography about his use of the drug in therapy and how it changed his life and perspective for the better.
It bothers me that a drug like this is so demonized that its possible therapeutic values are almost completely ignored. I know that there are some researchers still doing work in the area, but they are very few due to the huge legal obstacles at the federal levels.
I see this as just one more area where prohibition has harmed us. It's so sad that science has become subject to government after so many hundreds of years working to free it from the yoke of religion.
Edit: BTW, LSD is listed as a Schedule I drug (the most serious according to US law) and is listed with other such threats as MDMA, heroin, and mankind's worst enemy: Marijuana. It also carries a life sentence in federal prison upon a second trafficking offense.